Editor:
So SB 50 may have stalled, but so what? Santa Monica’s single family neighborhoods have already effectively been rezoned as commercial/industrial.
I have friends who own a house on one of Sunset Parks best streets. You would think they could enjoy their hard-earned peace and quiet…
EXCEPT that the house across from them runs a (city permitted) Airbnb, where the owner lives in a separate ADU in the back of the house and rents out the front house as a short-term rental. Large groups of tourists arrive at all hours of the day and night. And, a few houses on one side of them is a noisy family childcare facility. The operators are supposed to live on site according to state law, but they drive away each evening to sleep elsewhere, and neither the state nor the city chooses to enforce the residency requirement. And... a few houses in the other direction is another family childcare operation. And, at the end of their block, a group of older apartment buildings have been converted into permanent housing for formerly homeless persons. Of course, since many of those housed there are smokers, and they are not allowed to smoke onsite, they congregate on the sidewalk of the formerly quiet single family street, showering their cigarette butts onto the curbs nearby.
Just read the SM Municipal Code as it applies to R1 neighborhoods; there are so many exceptions to single family houses in R1 zones. For example the commercial child care facilities (20 + children) authorized in the latest version of our City Code? One is already going into the residential R1 neighborhood at Delaware Ave.
So it matters not if SB50 fails and apartment buildings don’t sprout like mushrooms in R1 neighborhoods, since the City of Santa Monica has already turned them into commercial/industrial zones.
Soon EVERY R1 street will have it's peace destroyed. I urge residents to wake up before it's too late. But alas, for my friends, it may already be too late.
Peter Borresen
Santa Monica
